A Smattering of Autumn Artistry and Light
by melrose plant
Summary: Teddy's painting is about to be critiqued by a renowned Charlottetown visitor; while Emily's new poem is critiqued by a harsher voice. A short snippet from an Emily jimmy-book. Emily, Dean, Teddy 'round time of Emily Climbs.


_I like the rain_, Emily told her Jimmy-book, _mostly in the Fall. When the leaves are just tripping down from the tall maples and the incendiary colours all bright and orange and afire brush the green meadows on the other side of Lofty John's bush. Teddy came running through blinding rain the other day from the Tansy Patch, near slipping on the wet cobbles, his jacket up over his black curls: not that the makeshift tent did him much good. I laughed to see him there like a wet puppy; all soggy and out of sorts. He took my hand and led me to the barn so we could hear the violent rain pound at the rooftop and just escape the wooden planks near the hayloft without ever quite getting in._

_I asked him what was so important for him to wrestle with the ungodly weather and he told me it was about his painting. The one with Queen Maab. Dean had looked at it quite skeptically last weekend and surreptitiously ( isn't that a delicious word, surreptitiously? I just love the way it lolls off my tongue) proclaimed that he should stick to what he knows. I have a feeling Aunt Elizabeth and Aunt Laura would say the same thing rather than see some higglety pigglety splash of dozens of interwoven colours. Odd, because I doubt they would agree with Dean on anything else. Other than politics. And maybe the fact that Old Parson Crawley from across the pond has more nuts loose than a squirrel's nest getting thrown off a branch by a mischievous cat. _

_I felt his breath all quick and sharp beside me still tired from his run. A few wayward strands of hay had latched to his coat and I felt them twine against my shoulder. This must be the most wonderful feeling in the world, an imp at the back of my head recognized, no matter how damp and unpleasant. It was still Teddy inside that damp sleeve. Teddy's voice and shortness of breath and excitement over a gentleman from Charlottetown who Old Tom MacMurray knew from yesteryear. Apparently Old Tom had seen a couple of Teddy's paintings at Mr. Carpenter's one evening after supper. Old Tom always had a keen eye for these type of things ( or so says Cousin Jimmy who went to school with him) and stole the Maab one away to Charlottetown. There, another gentleman, a Mr. Phineas Twarp saw it and his eyes lit up. It's "modern", or so Teddy was told. I don't know how Queen Maab can be modern. She's been around at least as long as Mercutio in Romeo and Juliet and that was written worlds ago._

_Teddy is to meet Phineas Twarp next Sunday afternoon after church as he's coming to stay with Old Tom and Kate MacMurray for a short sojourn._

_I hope they like Teddy's painting. I think he's just quite brilliant. But, Dean says I am biased._

_That's not all Dean has been saying of late. Last night I held out my white little hand, within it was one, lonely loose leaf sheet of paper, the only lines of a verse on Autumn I just can't seem to complete. I thought I would give it to Dean's eye for approval. Dean knows so much about poetry. He can recite Kubla Khan by heart. Even I still struggle on that one: though I have most of Wordsworth and Coleridge down. Dean was leaning over the fence. I could see him from behind. His one shoulder a trifle than the other. His tawny hair hidden under his tweed cap. _

_I whistled at him. To throw him off. He turned to face me: a mix of surprise and whimsy on his face. _

"_You know, Star, it's rude to whistle. Unless of course, you're calling a dog. Do you think me particularly canine like this evening, Emily?"_

_I laughed. Even Dean's insecurity was laughable sometimes. Especially because I was drunk on the prospect of showing my hastily scrawled treasure and the sudden chill that permeated the smoky, elusive Autumn night._

_The stars were all winking above and the dew was just kissing the ground on the point of frost. Nearby, Jimmy was burning leaves in a big old cylinder. I loved the smell._

_The flash had hit me the other night and I caressed Autumn like it was an old flame. Not that I know much about old flames; but I can imagine they inspire one to shiver and quell all at once. I knew that the first stanzas of my poem were the very best I had to give. _

Sweet Autumn mistress; moonlight bright

The crow takes solemn solitary flight

I turn o'er willowy meadow and vale

The mist elusive, winnowing, pale

You stir and steep and creep along

Throwing back the curtain for soon winter's song

_That is just one of five stanzas I printed in my best handwriting on the one page I handed to Dean. I always copy out my first drafts for him in my best hand. I think of him as I will think of my publishers one day: deserving of the very crispest and neatest manuscript I have to offer. I am, after all, a professional ( well, a burgeoning professional, but all the same)._

_Dean took the paper in his lean, brown hand; that mocking smile curving his lip. I hoped that when his eyes finally registered the soul in my poem; the way I tried to capture the Autumn as a white, winnowy woman soon veiled by the cold bleak of the incoming snow, his eyes would glaze appreciatively as the words permeated him to the core. At least, this is the scenario I had imagined last night, wringing my hands and staring wide awake at my white ceiling, rotating tonight over and over in my imagination._

_Dean's smile became slightly more altruistic as he turned the paper over in his hand as if looking for more._

"_Is this all you have, Star?"_

"_So far. I'm stuck after "melted mounds of crest-fallen snow." I love the alliteration that m sounds make, don't you?"_

_Dean looked far away. I don't think he had thought of it before._

"_It's quite charming, Emily."_

_Usually charm insinuates magic to me and if spoken by anyone else, I would have taken it as the supremest of compliments. But, somehow I knew that patronizing edge to Dean's musical voice._

"_You don't like it, do you?" I hedged._

"_It's charming Emily. The ladies magazines would eat it up."_

_Dean had no great like for the ladies magazines. He often said the fiction they printed was a mélange of cluttered clichés. I didn't want to be a cluttered cliché: no matter how beautiful the alliteration was. _

"_You don't like it, Dean. You don't like it and I am not even finished."_

_I fell against the fence and near closed my eyes in dismay. Those white nights my soul all aflutter in an attempt to capture Autumn's canvas in the same way Teddy captured Queen Maab: as a lusty, crazy old woman: all confusion and colour. _

"_Teddy's Queen Maab painting is going to be looked at by a gentleman from Charlottetown" I said, gingerly extracting my poem from Dean's outstretched hand. I would show the poem to Teddy. He would understand. Dean liked nature to a degree, I decided. But, like everything else in the parts of him that I didn't understand, nature was an odd dichotomy: a stripping of light to darkness and back again. _

"_What does that have to do with your poem?"_

"_We both value the opinion of erudite critics with keen eyes to all of art's sensibilities." I felt rather refined saying that. Dean just grinned his Cheshire grin._

"_And I am a valued critic?"_

"_My most valued, Dean, when it comes to my poems. That's why it's …. It's so frustrating that I can only write things worthy of the women's magazines you loathe. I really want to write something good for you sometime, Dean."_

_Dean's eyes intensified on me. "You want to write something for me?"_

"_Yes! Something good! You're the most qualified critic I know. Well, you and Mr. Carpenter. But you've traveled farther."_

_Something in Dean's eyes flickered and sparked. His face relaxed so the taut muscles tugging at the side of his ascetic lips smoothed. He looked a lot younger._

"_Starr, I think I'll need to review that poem again."_

_I alighted and handed it back to him. _

"_You say you need help with the bridge to the next stanza?"_

_I nodded._

"_And you say that Teddy's painting is being looked at by someone from Charlottetown?"_

_I nodded again. It was so rare that Dean took an interest in anything Teddy did: artistically or not. _

"_A Mr. Phineas Twarp. Or so I hear."_

"_I'll have to go over there myself."_

_Sometimes I think Dean forgets that with all the writing I do and will do and all the moments I steal entranced by Teddy's developing work, that I still need him. It does something funny to his face when he recognizes that. All that awkward silliness about our meeting at Malvern Bay and what I want to do with my "pen" subsides. It falls away._

_Maybe Dean remembers that he is a grown-up. That he's older than Teddy and I. That we need his validation because we're still growing and we haven't seen the full moon settle over Venice; or smelt the ripe Cherry Blossoms in rural Japan. I like to see Dean smile. It's not the same as Teddy's smile: which splays his entire personality on it like a card turned face up. Dean's smile has a trick to it: a layer of melancholy and light. Just like Teddy's odd Queen Maab portrait that at a certain angle seems like a rainbow and at another angle seems like his portrait of Medusa: chaos and helter-skelter, her snake hair winding toward the tawdry atmosphere._

_I felt better clutching my hands to my chest as I walked past the old sundial; the Blair Water lights blinking in the distance; the music of the water kissing the shore._

_Dean would look over my poem with the same creatively helpful eye as Phineas Tawdry would explore the contours of Teddy's painting and somehow the both of us, though artists of decidedly different mediums, would be better for the experience. _


End file.
